


Trombone Stan and You’re Out

by Lalalli



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Marie Kondo - Freeform, Roommates, tidying up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-10-12 15:34:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17470256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lalalli/pseuds/Lalalli
Summary: Bellamy thinks he probably knows everything about Clarke at this point.  So he’s a bit disconcerted when he comes home from work to find her reverently thanking a neon pink Getting Swole for Senpai tank top before placing it carefully into a trash bag.Bellamy knew that Clarke’s been watching Marie Kondo’s Netflix show. He didn’t expect her to actually start cleaning.*In which Bellamy and Clarke discover what sparks joy.





	Trombone Stan and You’re Out

**Author's Note:**

> All italicized quotes are from Marie Kondo. 
> 
> I do not have strong feelings about Marie Kondo. I find both the hype and the backlash baffling in equal measure.

_“A dramatic reorganization of the home causes correspondingly dramatic changes in lifestyle and perspective. It is life transforming.”_

_*_

If Bellamy were to be purely objective and write down a list comparing the qualities and habits of every roommate he’s ever had, Clarke would probably rank as the worst.  She leaves her shoes lying around everywhere, blasts her music when she’s working on her art, even if it’s at 6 am on a Saturday morning, and very determinedly refuses to follow the cleaning schedule Bellamy keeps posted in the kitchen, even though his previous three roommates had no problems alternating Sundays mopping the floors.

Despite this, Bellamy loves living with Clarke. It’s like having an extended sleepover with his best friend. They marathon Nailed It together, shit-talk everyone they know together, take pointless Buzzfeed quizzes together. Bellamy probably knows everything about her at this point.

So he’s a bit disconcerted when he comes home from work to find her reverently thanking a neon pink Getting Swole for Senpai tank top before placing it carefully into a trash bag.

Bellamy knew that Clarke’s been watching Marie Kondo’s Netflix show, but he didn’t expect her to actually start _cleaning_. Clarke loves watching self-improvement shows, but she’s never made an effort to participate before. He’s seen her polish off an entire pint of mint chip ice cream while marathoning The Biggest Loser.  

His first instinct, as usual, is to tease her, but he honestly doesn’t even know where to begin. Fortunately, Clarke notices him before his brain actually breaks. “Hey! How was your day?”

“Fine. Yours looks like it was...productive?”

“Yeah.” She gestures towards three full trash bags leaning against the wall by the door. “I’m taking these to Goodwill later. Is there anything you want me to drop off for you while I’m at it?”

He hadn’t been planning on it, but watching Clarke sort through the mountain of clothes on her bed is a little inspiring. Plus, maybe if he does the whole tidying thing with her, she’ll be more likely to continue. Bellamy is fully in support of Clarke cleaning- not because of any patriarchal gender roles bullshit or anything. Bellamy has tried, repeatedly, to clean up after Clarke, but she gets upset whenever Bellamy moves her keys to the table by the entryway because if he had just left it alone, she would’ve eventually remembered that she forgot them on top of the microwave, which would have somehow been faster than just looking for them in the most logical place imaginable?

“Yeah, just let me go through my stuff.”

Clarke brightens. “Well, as long as you’re going through your stuff, we might as well do it right.”

*

 

_“There are three approaches we can take toward our possessions: face them now, face them sometime, or avoid them until the day we die.”_

 

 _*_  

“Doing it right” apparently involves spending his entire night piling the contents of his closet on the bed, holding every item of clothing that he owns one by one to determine if it “sparks joy”, then refolding everything he decides to keep into neat little rolls so that they could be stacked vertically in his drawers. The process is surprisingly exhausting, and when he flops into his bed at one in the morning, sleep comes easy.

Bellamy has spent every Friday night for the past year with Clarke, whether it’s at home on the couch or at the bar with their friends. He likes spending time with Clarke, and while he can appreciate the bonding that occurs when undertaking a project together, he would’ve appreciated it a lot more if said bonding had taken place with them in the same room.  He knows that it probably would’ve taken longer with the two of them distracting each other, but it definitely would’ve made the undertaking more enjoyable and less tedious.

The only upside to his Friday night activities is that Clarke climbs into his bed at 2:30 in the morning, informs him that she still has a huge pile of clothes on her bed and that she’s using his bed to take a nap, and sticks her cold feet between his shins. Bellamy has shared a bed with Clarke a few times before, mostly by accident, but he’s always been a fan. She has a tendency to snuggle into his side, all warm and soft and nice-smelling. It’s what he imagines he could have all the time if he were in an actual relationship with her.

When Bellamy wakes the next morning, Clarke’s side of the bed is cold, but her scent is still there. Usually, he lets himself laze in bed on Saturday mornings, scrolling through his Instagram feed until he feels a little more awake. This time, Clarke barges in after about 30 seconds, as though she can sense that he’s awake.

“I’m finally done! Where’s your stuff?”

Bellamy points blearily towards the Amazon box at the foot of his bed. Clarke stops short as she’s about to pick up the box. She holds up an ugly brown plaid shirt from the top of the pile of clothes. “You’re getting rid of this?”

Bellamy shrugs. “I’ve had it since high school. I figured it was time.” Plus, two of the buttons have fallen off and there’s a rip in the armpit and it doesn’t really fit him that well anymore.  He’s only kept it for so long because he was proud that he got it with the tags still attached from a thrift store for a dollar. Back in high school, it was very rare for him to get anything brand new.

Clarke’s still just standing there with a blank look on her face, so Bellamy offers,  “You want me to drive?” He’s not sure how long Clarke’s nap was, but she looks way too exhausted to operate a car.

Clarke shakes her head a little as though to clear it and shifts her gaze to look at his face. “Huh?”

“To Goodwill,” Bellamy clarifies. “Want me to drive to Goodwill?”

Clarke blinks. “Oh. Yeah. Sure.”

Bellamy shakes his head and pushes his blankets off his legs. “Get some coffee in you, Griffin. You look like you’re about to drop dead.”

Clarke scowls. “Shut up, Blake. Not all of us can looks like _that_ first thing in the morning.” She gestures towards the general vicinity of his abs.

Bellamy can’t help but grin. “Like what?” Did he get out of bed in front of Clarke knowing full well that he was only wearing boxer briefs? Yes, yes he did. It’s entirely possible he’s hoping that Clarke will be overcome with lust before Bellamy inevitably reaches his breaking point and awkwardly confesses his undying love.

He’s not sure, exactly, how long he’s been in love with Clarke. He’s _known_ about his feelings for about a year, but he also knows those feelings existed way longer than that. He assumes it happened gradually, considering that he didn’t even realize what was happening until he was already in over his head.  It’s like going swimming in the ocean and getting caught in a riptide. One moment, he was just having fun, splashing around, and the next, he realized he somehow managed to drift like a mile from where he started and there was no use in trying to figure out how he got to this point because the only way he’s going to survive is by keeping his head above water and letting the current carry him to wherever it ends.

Granted, it’s not the best metaphor. It makes loving Clarke sound more catastrophic than it actually is.  It’s a little stressful, but it’s also nice, in its own way. He feels bigger than himself, like he has a purpose. Like he was put on this earth to love Clarke.

Unfortunately, Clarke does not take this opportunity to ravish his body. Instead, she just mutters something under her breath about how he’s a cocky asshole and scurries out of the room.

It’s a testament to how far they’ve come that she’s muttering it instead of screaming it. The first year they knew each other, back when she was just Octavia’s bratty privileged roommate and he was Octavia’s overprotective asshole brother, they butt heads more often than not.  There were many occasions when Octavia returned to her dorm room after class to find them shouting obscenities at each other.

But then they both ended up in Cage Wallace’s sociology class, which led to actual conversations about the readings whenever Bellamy came over to visit Octavia, which led to bonding over Cage Wallace being a massively sexist and xenophobic dickhead, which led to further bonding over late night study sessions that went so long they ended with Denny’s hash browns at dawn, over midnight showings of horror b-movies, over the Lexapocalypse and the Echotastrophe, all of which led to them being ride or die for life.

“So what’s after this?”

Clarke yawns, stretching in the passenger seat of his car. “I don’t know. IHOP?”

Bellamy quickly glances at Clarke out of the corner of his eye before returning his attention to the road. “No, I mean-”

“You wanna do Denny’s instead?”

Bellamy huffs impatiently. “Yeah, fine, I’m on board with pancakes, just.” He taps his fingertips against the steering wheel. “I mean, what are we going to clean next? The kitchen? The living room?”

Clarke brightens. “You’re going to do it with me?”

“I mean, half the stuff in the apartment is mine,” Bellamy points out. “There’s no point in tidying up halfway, right?”

“In that case, you’re going to love our next project.”

*

 

_“The most important part of this process of tidying is to always think about what you have and about the discovery of your sense of value, what you value that is important.”_

 

*

Bellamy does not love the next project.

“So you’re supposed to pick them up - ”

“No.”

“- one at a time-“

“Absolutely not.”

“And only keep the ones that bring you joy.”

Bellamy glares at Clarke. “They _all_ bring me joy.”

Clarke drops a stack of books onto the floor. “Okay, but do you really need _three_ copies of Herodotus?”

Bellamy hurriedly gathers the books and holds them protectively to his chest. “ _Yes_. This one has all my notes, this one is lightweight enough to carry around, and this hardcover one looks old and cool.”

Clarke rolls her eyes. “I spend a lot of time with you and I have never seen you carry that book around for spontaneous casual reading.”

Bellamy busies himself with putting his books back in their proper places on the shelf.  “I refuse to believe that ‘books’ is an entire category.”

“It is!” Clarke insists.

“This is bullshit!” Bellamy argues, turning to her. “Why can’t we just organize the kitchen already?”

Clarke lets out a long-suffering sigh. “Because, I already told you.  Everything in the kitchen is miscellaneous, and we do that fourth.”

“Then let’s do the bathroom.”

“That’s also fourth. How many times do I need to explain that we need to do books and papers before miscellaneous?”

“And literally everything else in the apartment is miscellaneous?” Bellamy asks in disbelief.

“Except for the sentimental stuff, like photos and souvenirs? Yes.”

“Okay.” Bellamy points at the television. “Put it on,” he demands.

Clarke‘s forehead wrinkles. “What?”

“Put on the show. I need to hear it from the source.”

“That’s really not necessary.” Clarke cues up Netflix anyways. “Look, I’m not saying you have to get rid of them; I’m just saying going through them is part of the _process_.”

One of the many side-effects of growing up poor is that Bellamy has an extremely difficult time throwing things away.  Maybe to another family, a collection of empty margarine and sour cream containers wouldn’t spark joy, but for his family, it was more cost-efficient than buying Tupperware. (It’s why he doesn’t mind that Clarke’s steadily-growing collection of empty travel-size shampoo bottles is slowly taking over the bathroom. He’s pretty sure she’s planning on doing _something_ with them.)

And Bellamy knows that the whole getting-rid-of-a-shitton-of-stuff thing is helpful for a lot of people...it’s just that most of those people are going to be upper middle class.

This whole process is for people who have rooms specifically designated for their kids to play in. This is for people who use guest rooms as a second walk-in closet. There’s a marked difference between his book collection, which only fills up three bookshelf units (two of which fit quite neatly in his bedroom) and a collection of Christmas decorations that take up an entire room.

But again, he doesn’t want to discourage Clarke in any way, so he tries his best to bite his tongue.  ‘Tries’ being the operative word.

Clarke glances at Bellamy when he lets out yet another involuntary scoff. “Care to share with the class?”

Bellamy gestures towards the screen. “This isn’t a long-term solution. Tidying up isn’t going to fix the problem because the mess isn’t the cause of the problem. It’s a symptom.”

“A symptom,” Clarke repeats.

“Yeah. That house is a mess because that mom is working part time and taking care of two toddlers by herself. Their relationship isn’t going to get fixed just because they reorganized the kitchen. Jesus, this show is depressing.”

Clarke’s jaw tightens the way it does whenever they’re about to get into an argument. “So you think we’re doing this for nothing?”

Bellamy groans. “You know that’s not what I’m saying. I’m talking about _them_. We’re just cleaning because it’s good to clean. They’re apparently doing it to fix whatever problems they’re having.” He pauses. “Unless you’re having a problem you’re not telling me about?”

Clarke rolls her eyes. “My only problem is you.”

*

 

_“When we honestly confront the things we own, they evoke many emotions within us. Those feelings are real. It is these emotions that give us the energy for living.”_

 

_*_

In the end, they compromise that Bellamy will keep his books as long as they can be contained to their three bookshelves, with the understanding that he will prune his collection if it ever looks like they need to get a fourth bookshelf. They spend Sunday working on papers, which doesn’t take very long for Bellamy at all because he has everything organized and up-to-date in an accordion file folder. Bellamy helps Clarke sort through all her papers and shows her how his organization system works in case she wants to file them the same way.

During the week, Bellamy feels pretty good about their project. He and Clarke get a pretty good routine going where they sit on the floor of their apartment every day and sort through their shit while eating takeout.  It’s the start of the new semester, so Bellamy doesn’t have a ton of grading to do, which means that if he goes home right after school, he and Clarke can organize for a solid six hours. Be Wednesday, they have enough stuff set aside to warrant a second trip to Goodwill.  They sort everything that’s left into piles and Clarke goes out and buys clear storage containers and drawer dividers for everything. Bellamy even helps Clarke set up a new storage system for her art supplies and recycled odds and ends so that she doesn’t have to toss the collection of foil gum wrappers she’s accumulated over the past eight months.

He thinks they’re making a lot of progress, so when his donated belongings start reappearing around the apartment, it feels an awful lot like backsliding.

First, it’s his twin-sized, bleach-stained bedspread from college, crumpled on the armchair as though someone had been huddled in it and forgot it there. Then it’s the cracked ceramic mug, a souvenir from the Parthenon in Tennessee, holding Clarke’s bobbi pins in the bathroom.  He knows they’re still in the apartment because of Clarke, but he doesn’t really see much point in bringing it up to her. He got rid of them because he had no use for them anymore. If Clarke has a use for them, she’s allowed to keep them.

And then his shirt reappears.

Bellamy does a double take when Clarke walks into the kitchen. “Is that mine?” It’s mostly a rhetorical question; she is definitely wearing  the same hideous black and brown plaid shirt he threw out the previous week.

“It _used_ to be yours,” Clarke corrects him. “You tossed it.”

He stares at her. “And you kept it?”

Clarke shrugs. “It sparked joy.”

Bellamy tries not to read into it. He knows that it’s a comfortable shirt and that it fits within Clarke’s preferred lounging attire aesthetic, which seems to be homeless sorority lumberjack, as far as he can tell. But part of him hopes that part of it is because she’s feeling sentimental. Even better, sentimental over _him_.

They are both going to suck so much at the last category.

*

 

_“Just because you dispose of something does not mean you give up past experiences or your identity. Through the process of selecting only those things that inspire joy, you can identify precisely what you love and what you need.”_

 

*

For all that Bellamy is bad at talking about his feelings, he’s actually a very sentimental person. He has two big storage containers filled with every birthday card he’s ever gotten, every picture that a student has ever drawn for him, every shrinky dink that Octavia made for him in grade school. The thought of getting rid of _any_ of it makes him itch.

And it really shouldn’t take 30 minutes of deliberation to decide whether to keep a Starbucks gift card envelope that says “To Mr. Blake. From Rebecca.” It’s just that the longer he teaches, the harder it is to remember any of his students, and he needs all the reminders he can get.

He’s working on sorting his keep pile into categories (students, friends, professors, Octavia, etc.) and is contemplating the relative merits and drawbacks of compiling a scrapbook for each pile when Clarke checks in on him. “You’re still working on this?” She sits down cross-legged across from him.  “Is this the discard pile?”

Bellamy doesn’t look up to see what she’s referring to. “No, I’m just sorting my keep pile.”

“What are you keeping all these post-it notes for?”

Bellamy’s head jerks up at that. “Wait a second. Don’t-”

“Good luck on your interview,” she reads, her eyebrows furrowed. She picks up the next one. “We're out of tp.”

Bellamy flings out his arm and swipes the multi-colored pile of sticky notes towards himself before Clarke can read any more of them.

Not that she needs to. She’s seen more than enough.  “Those are all from me?”

Bellamy doesn’t look at her, choosing instead to focus intently on stacking the sticky notes, one on the other, lining up the corners just to keep his hands busy.

“You kept all of them,” she says, her voice full of wonder.

“You _are_ my friend,” he says lightly. There. Plausible deniability.

Clarke is silent for a long moment.  “You know how you were saying that the clutter is the symptom, not the problem?”

Bellamy’s heart stops for a moment, before picking up again, faster than ever, because she _knows._

“Well, I was thinking about that while I was going through my room,” she continues, which surprises Bellamy, because this isn’t where he thought she was going. “Looking at that dumb tiara you got me for my birthday years ago, and the crochet hook you lent me that I never returned, and all those old history papers I kept because you proofread them for me and left comments in the margins. And you know what I realized?”

Clarke’s hand lands on Bellamy’s shoulder, her fingers curling over onto his back. Bellamy looks up at her. She’s smiling at him with an impossibly fond look on her face.  Bellamy can feel his own smile growing, hope unfurling in his chest.

“ _Bing_!”

Bellamy frowns. “What’s that supposed to be?”

A crinkle appears between Clarke’s eyes. “It’s that sound - the ‘sparks joy’ sound. You know. _Bing_!”

“Oh!” Bellamy pauses, unsure of whether to continue, but he never could resist needling Clarke.  “I thought it was supposed to be more of a “ _Ching_!”

Clarke rolls her eyes, her grip tightening on his shoulder, pulling him towards her as she breathes out an exasperated, “Oh my God, just shut up already.”

And then she’s kissing him, her lips surprisingly gentle on his considering the force with which she’s clutching his arms. He slides one hand behind her neck, strokes her jaw with the pad of this thumb, and the spark of joy kindles a warm flame that crackles under his skin. It’s not a fire that combusts, that burns uncontrollably, that chars and devours. It’s the kind of fire that glows in a hearth, the kind that’s cheerful and cozy, the kind that signifies _home_.

“That your way of shutting me up?” Bellamy teases when they part.

Clarke scooches closer so that her knees touch his knees, and reaches behind his head to play with his overgrown curls. “That’s my way of saying that I’m keeping you.”

*

 

_“To put things in order means to put your past in order, too. It’s like resetting your life and settling your accounts so that you can take the next step forward.”_

 

*

Two years later, they revisit their book compromise.

“Our agreement was three bookshelves!” Clarke reminds him.

“That agreement was made when it was just the two of us. More people, more bookshelves.”

Clarke flings out her arm to gesture towards their living room. “Yet our apartment is the same size.”

Bellamy glances around the apartment as though making mental calculations. “Okay,” he sighs. “You’re right.”

Clarke blinks. “I am?” She rests her hands on her protruding belly. “Are you just giving in because I’m the size of a humpback whale?”

“Just, between the baby furniture and the toys and all the other stuff we’ll need to store for a third person, we don’t have room for a fourth bookshelf,” Bellamy admits.  He loops an arm around Clarke’s shoulders and grins. “I guess we’ll just have to get a bigger place.”

  
Clarke laughs and pokes his forehead with her index finger.  “ _Ching_.”


End file.
